Every week a small team is helping 60,000 school children encounter Jesus across England and Wales. Having come into being only four years ago, they are hoping this number will increase “exponentially”, according to Greg Finn, the founder of the Mark 10 Mission. With 850,000 children in over 2,000 Catholic schools — “an amazing gift” says Greg — the potential for evangelising a generation of children is huge.
The charity was set up by Greg — then a primary school teacher — during the pandemic when unpredictable school closures made it all but impossible to bring children together for common prayer and worship. Greg and The Mark 10 Mission team adapted quickly to the online teaching environment and started producing short, engaging and high-quality recorded liturgies, which could be easily played by teachers across the country.
Each clip is led by either Greg or one of the team, which now includes the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and Fr Henry Longbottom, a diocesan priest and many more contributors. The liturgy includes a Gospel reading, a short commentary and then a period of silent reflection, during which children are encouraged to sit quietly and encounter Jesus through the Word. Throughout the year, the key moments in the Church’s calendar are recognised and explained, as well and there are one-off liturgies during which the Rosary or the Stations of the Cross are prayed.
The team behind Mark 10 Mission want children to “experience God’s presence” rather than for the videos to be about intellectual formation. During Greg’s work, he has noticed that there is an understandable lack of confidence around leading prayer and teachers are tasked with the challenge of creating valuable moments of prayer within the business of a school day. With schools often under pressure to focus on developing skills and knowledge, he felt it was important to make prayer and the practice of prayer central to the content he produces. “Prayer is not comprehension,” he said, but rather an opportunity to really meet the Lord.
In setting up the charity, Greg — who has taken on this work fulltime — was responding to two challenges facing the 2,200 Catholic schools in England and Wales.
Firstly, as the numbers of practising Catholics declines in England and Wales, this means that there are fewer Catholic teachers. As a result, non-Catholic teachers, who are diligent and essential for our Catholic schools, have to quickly familiarise themselves with how to lead prayer, which can be a challenge given already high workloads. This is a key part of the thinking behind creating “unapologetically Catholic”, high-quality resources that can be easily slotted into the school day.
The second challenge is to respond to an increasingly visual and technologically savvy generation of children. A world now saturated by smartphones, advertising and social media makes it even more difficult for teachers to engage children and teenagers.
The fact that The Mark 10 Mission became one of the country’s most important Catholic evangelisers in only a few years and is reaching tens of thousands of children every week shows that a need was there and is now being met.
Greg and The Mark 10 Mission team have big plans: they’ve launched a new project for secondary schools, called The Redeemed. The latter will present new challenges, given that teenagers can often be a tougher audience to crack than children. However he remains confident of the impact The Mark 10 Mission is having and will have.
To find out more about the inspiring work that Mark 10 Mission is doing in schools across England & Wales, explore their website here.
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